The Last Morning 1939

This stark etching, The Last Morning, was made by Frank Daniel Fousek sometime in the mid-twentieth century. I can imagine him bent over the plate, carefully building up the image with thousands of tiny, precise marks. It looks like a humble farmyard scene, but the longer I look, the more ominous it becomes. Is it actually the last morning? What’s going to happen? The chickens seem oblivious, but the landscape feels heavy with unspoken meaning. Fousek has created this incredible sense of depth and texture using only black and white. You can almost feel the rough wood of the fence and the dusty ground. The way he's depicted the light, filtering through the bare branches of the tree, creates a somber atmosphere. I feel a kinship with Fousek, this need to translate an inner world into a physical form. Artists are always in conversation, building on what came before, finding new ways to express the complexities of life. And so we keep making, keep digging, keep searching for meaning in the marks we leave behind.